Don't have it to hand but I think it refers to "collections" approved by the bishops – New Celebration for Everyone, Laudate revised. Now, how they handle items which are not in collections is beyond me.

Careful, people: there are a lot of confident statements about copyright here - and a similar number of equally confident rebuttals. It is all getting very confusing. I am going to suggest to the SSG Trustees that it would be an act of service on their part if they were to commission an authoritative and detailed statement on "copyright and the liturgy" for publication in Music and Liturgy and on here. I'll let you know how I get on. Meanwhile, please carry on...

musicus wrote:Careful, people: there are a lot of confident statements about copyright here - and a similar number of equally confident rebuttals. It is all getting very confusing. I am going to suggest to the SSG Trustees that it would be an act of service on their part if they were to commission an authoritative and detailed statement on "copyright and the liturgy" for publication in Music and Liturgy and on here. I'll let you know how I get on. Meanwhile, please carry on...

Thats a brilliant idea. A bit of clarity might free up the likes of me to put pen to paper a little more often.

It would be great to see a definitive article on copyright and the liturgy. I suspect it would need a lawyers (canon and secular) to approve it prior to publication!

On Bishop Alan's hope I also wonder whether the post V2 outpouring of music from Europeans and Americans may be coming to an end and whether, in future, we shall need to rely more on African, Asian and South American composers for our liturgical music? There seem to be fewer Catholic musicians about in England, compared to 40 years ago!

JW wrote:It would be great to see a definitive article on copyright and the liturgy. I suspect it would need a lawyers (canon and secular) to approve it prior to publication!

It would also need some decent consultants with experience in this field. One of the problems with copyright lawyers is that they tend to have blinkered experience and are not familiar with the labyrinthine complexities of music for the Church, especially the Roman Catholic Church. I have often found them to be stating opinions which eventually turned out to be at the least incomplete and in the worst cases erroneous.

Southern Comfort wrote:Whenever the Entrance or Communion Antiphon is a psalm verse, you will find that this is taken direct from the Revised Grail Psalter, so not copyright ICEL but administered by GIA.

Be careful here. Entrance and Communion verses are often not direct quotations of psalm or other scriptural verses, but were originally edited for the purpose back in the seventh century. The result is that, although they are often similar (and sometimes identical) to the Revised Grail Psalter, the translations in the Missal are specifically tailored to match the original Latin texts. That is why ICEL can (and does) assert copyright over their use of them.

That is certainly true in some cases, but the people who revised the ICEL Antiphonary between its completion in 2008 (it was the last section of the Missal to be translated) and the eventual Missal released in 2010 didn't necessarily realize this and in more than a few instances that I have examined simply "dumped" the RGP text into the antiphon whenever they saw a scripture reference (if it didn't have "cf." in front of it). It was a slap in the face to the antiphon translators, who are known to some on this forum, and who had spent 18 months on a labour of love, producing an antiphonary which was not only reasonably faithful to the Latin but also singable. Their work was simply jettisoned without a word of thanks. Because the small group that worked on the "anonymous" revisions did not find it necessary to consult each other, we now have an antiphonary where, for example, the same antiphon appears in three different places in the Missal with three different translations. Heigh ho!

musicus wrote:Careful, people: there are a lot of confident statements about copyright here - and a similar number of equally confident rebuttals. It is all getting very confusing. I am going to suggest to the SSG Trustees that it would be an act of service on their part if they were to commission an authoritative and detailed statement on "copyright and the liturgy" for publication in Music and Liturgy and on here. I'll let you know how I get on. Meanwhile, please carry on...

It didn't happen in quite the way envisaged by Musicus, but I led a session at a Composers Forum on the 'Permission to Publish' process and copyright after that. Now that we have our new website, with more facilities, a guide to copyright and performance rights will be uploaded (eventually, when I get time to write it!).